The National Offshore Safety Advisory Committee advises the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security on matters and actions concerning activities directly involved with or in support of the exploration of offshore mineral and energy resources insofar as they relate to matters within U.S. Coast Guard jurisdiction. Applicants selected for service on the National Offshore Safety Advisory Committee via this solicitation will not begin their respective terms until Jan. 31, 2019.

The campaign, scheduled to take place this spring, will involve interagency teams visiting multiple drilling and production units across the Gulf of Mexico. Teams will use a focused inspections protocol to evaluate safety, gather and provide data to BSEE’s Office of Safety Management.

The National Offshore Safety Advisory Committee and its subcommittees will meet in New Orleans, Louisiana, to discuss the safety of operations and other matters affecting the offshore oil and gas industry. These meetings are open to the public.

As the offshore oil and gas industry pushed exploration into deeper water, it found that conventional anchoring became less practical and cost effective. The advent of DP brought the industry an effective, yet complex solution to remaining stationary while conducting high consequence operations. In this issue of ‘Drill Down’ the Outer Continental Shelf National Center of Expertise discusses the basics of a Dynamic Positioning (DP) system.

The Outer Continental Shelf National Center of Expertise released its latest issue of “Drill Down,” an outreach and knowledge management tool designed to educate those involved with or interested in the OCS world of work, and to help generate discussion within the OCS community. Regulatory compliance standards for the various categories of OCS production facilities are covered in this issue.

The MBI concluded that the primary cause of the casualty was the decision to navigate El Faro too close to the path of Hurricane Joaquin. As the MBI expanded the investigation to explore other contributing factors, it uncovered evidence of an ineffective safety management system within the operating company, and failures by both the Coast Guard delegated representative and the Coast Guard itself to provide effective oversight of the vessel’s compliance with safety regulations.

Field Notice 01-17 provides Coast Guard expectations for dealing with alarms from EGCSs, where such alarms are triggered by short-term temporary emission exceedances due to predictable operations of vessels, such as engine load changes. Field Notice 01-17 is intended for vessels operating in the U.S. portion of the North American Emission Control Area (ECA) and the U.S. Caribbean Sea ECA.

The Coast Guard announced in the Federal Register that it is issuing new tasking to five federal advisory committees to help the agency identify existing regulations, guidance, and collections of information (that fall within the scope of each committee’s charter) for possible repeal, replacement, or modification.

In this issue of the Drill Down, experts talk about characteristics and operating parameters of both floating and fixed OCS production facilities, spars, tension leg platforms, semi-submersibles, and floating, production, storage, and offloading units (FPSOs).

[Your user agent does not support frames or is currently configured not to display frames. However, you may visit the related document.]

This blog is not a replacement or substitute for the formal posting of regulations and updates or existing processes for receiving formal feedback of the same. Links provided on this blog will direct the reader to official source documents, such as the Federal Register, Homeport and the Code of Federal Regulations. These documents remain the official source for regulatory information published by the Coast Guard.